Welcome to Whitken & Co.! We are a design studio and lifestyle blog based in Anderson, SC. Our goal is to help you create a beautiful functional, and healing home for you and your family to live, work, play in, and share with others.

A large, comfortable second hand sectional that sat a lot of our family and friends

The corner section to curl up in

Letting the dogs up to snuggle because it’s worn and dirty anyways so who cares

A rug that provided softness underfoot and warmed up the room and quieted the echoes of an old house

The frayed and chewed edges that I secretly kind of liked

Kendall’s grandmother’s chair that everyone called the throne and had to try out at least once when visiting

The Bad:

Enough dirt to make a few good men constantly under the old, shedding rug no matter how often you cleaned under it, (which let’s face wasn’t often since it didn’t make much difference)

The smell from said rug

Lamps that are too short

A million pillows because Chloe chewed the sofa cushions

A dysfunctional, crowded room

The Ugly:

The TV on the mantel

An electric cord running across the room for said TV

Naked lamp bulbs (which we still have)

A dingy, discolored couch

The way we feel when we’re in here

We don’t have to ignore the bad and ugly to appreciate the good and the beautiful. They’re often intertwined. It’s what and where we choose to focus on that matters.

Appreciating the good and the beautiful also doesn’t mean we have to settle for the bad and the ugly. We can dream and plan and work and save towards change. We all know Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Acquiring pieces for and redecorating our living room has been a slow process over the last few months with still more to go, (yellow walls, I’m looking at you) but right now it’s the progress that matters and feels good. Can’t wait to share more with you soon!

Beauty and character, although they may seem effortless, seldom rarely are. Behind the scenes is often a lot of demolition and deconstruction. Tearing out of the old and ugly in order to create, build, and reveal something special and wonderful. Sometimes all it requires is a little tap of the hammer or gentle pry of the crow bar to knock something loose, sometimes it involves whaling back with all of your might and strength to loosen things up and pry them out, and sometimes you have to pull on your gloves and rip them out with your hands and sheer force of will. Sometimes you are the one doing the demolition and sometimes outside forces do it for you.

At the end, when all has been stripped away, you’re left standing in the mess, matted hair, sweat trickling down your face and back, bloody knuckles, filthy clothes that you hardly recognize anymore. You’re surrounded by debris and left staring at the gaping holes you didn’t even know were there. But as the dust settles and you begin to clear out the refuse, you start to see the rugged beauty that was hidden unknown beneath the surface. Imagining all of the possibilities, you start to get a vision for what it (or you) can become.

In life and art, in creating and renovating and restoring, things must often get worse before they get better. Chaos must ensue before order, confusion before clarity. But when we push through the pain, when we allow the demolition and the deconstruction, when we work through the confusion and the chaos, that’s when the magic starts to happen. Not the kind of magic where the magician flicks a handkerchief and a bouquet appears. But more like the magic of a sculptor slowly chipping away at a block of marble to reveal what only he can see, or the magic of a potter shaping mud with her hands.

It’s scary, the ripping out and demolition part, whether it’s your house or your heart. But it’s also exciting. True, ugly things will surface, some major, requiring a total gut job, and some minor, allowing for a quick patch and fix. But the beauty and the possibilities that are also hiding and waiting to be brought forth are worth the pain and worth the work.

The Covergirl: 2 Tips for "Hiding" Flaws in Your Walls

It was orange. Like Orange is the New Black kind of orange, with large, colorful polka dots scattered across a white border, glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceilings and walls – some dangling from clear thread stuck to the ceiling with tape, and a Scripture verse thickly hand painted around the top of said border.

Obviously it had been a child’s room, but that fact did not make me feel any less assaulted by it. We’d just moved into #therobertleerobinsonhouse and my brother-in-law and another friend were coming to live with us for a few weeks, one of whom would be staying in this room. And so the orange and stars and polka dots just had to go. At least I felt that they did.

The guys said they didn’t care about the color but let me tell you one thing I’ve learned in life. When a man tells you he doesn’t care about something, it’s not that he really doesn’t care. It’s just that he doesn’t realize it yet. The one thing I haven’t quite figured out though, is why I am so hell bent on creating more work for myself by proving to them that they do.

I think part of it is so that I can create a pretty space, but part of it is also the satisfaction of hearing them tell me unsolicited how much better a space feels after we’ve fixed it up or even tell me multiple times how much they hate a color I’ve chosen. I may not say the words “I told you so” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t written across my face. I mean, I am only human after all.

So off to the paint store I went to pick up a paint I’d chosen based off a picture I’d seen in a catalog (not my usual method, but this color had grabbed my imagination like thorns in a thicket and I just had to try it.)

The obnoxious paint and crazy polka dots and stars were not this gaudy lady’s only flaws. She also possessed a shoddy sheetrock job with multiple indentations and even some bowing in the ceiling and trim that’d seen too many layers of paint. It looked like she’d just kept applying new layers of makeup without ever removing the old. Not pretty.

So, like a woman masking her body by wearing all black, I picked out a dark, moody shade and proceeded to not just paint the walls but also the ceiling and trim. By painting everything I was hoping to minimize some of her flaws and give her a little sophistication and class. I also chose some graphic and bold bedding to add contrast and detract from them even more by drawing your eye to the bed rather than the walls. Mostly it worked. Her flaws were still there, but less obvious.